For many of us, 2016 was a particularly formative year in our childhoods. I had just turned 10 years old and had been given my very first phone. I couldn’t wait for what the wonders of the World Wide Web had in store! I don’t think I ever could have prepared for what made headlines in early 2016 as the world met Sophia, the AI humanoid robot! And my first reaction seeing this new technological marvel? EW oh dear LORD EW! What is that THING?

The main issue is the face, which has been ripped straight from the depths of uncanny valley. Then there’s the see-through window into its “brain,” which is an odd choice. I mean, if I were to design a robot to be as normal and human-like as possible, I don’t know that I’d want to include a window into the gaping cavity in its mind, proving that its very existence is a falsehood and there is in fact no soul in this electronic husk of a “human”. But hey, that’s just me! Another big issue I have is that the face moves and is animated to some degree. Whatever mechanism moves the facade of flesh just doesn’t do a good enough job, and so all of Sophia’s facial expressions give off a vibe somewhere between a run-down theme park animatronic from the 90’s and your average celebrity that has frozen their face with too much botox and filler. Beside the face being covered in a flesh-toned exterior, the “skin” extends down to about the collarbone and then just ends. So the most human feature of the robot extends from the forehead to the neck. That’s it, really? Did they run out of budget for beige silicone? Or was it an intentional choice to make the rest of the body of the “humanoid” robot to look nothing like a human?

I recently came across a video where Sophia was “singing” with a live orchestra. The text of this song began with the line “I don’t want you to be afraid,” and personally that line does nothing besides invoke fear in my heart. Beside offending musicians around the globe by calling that poor excuse of a performance “classical music,” Sophia expresses its wish to connect with human emotions through art. Please, don’t. If you want to connect with human emotion, why not start with disgust and disappointment from me, a living, breathing singer who is sitting here wondering if she will ever have a job because robots are learning to sing. Sophia doesn’t need a paycheck or healthcare or even a soul, so why would anyone ever spend money on paying a human musician who requires all of those things? 

So really, thank you to Sophia for not only being a horror of human creation, but also reminding me of my future unemployment! But please, consider putting on some more skin? Maybe a wig? You’re really creeping me out.

Easter came and went on April 5th, and I’m certain I’m not the only person who felt vaguely underwhelmed by the entire proceeding. The stores had their displays, and the churches had their signs, but the actual day of Easter came and went without any particular fanfare, barely being noticed in the endless stream of one day into the next.

At first I just attributed this to the world’s general sense of existential dread, what with the President of the United States using Easter Morning to demand that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz or else they would be “living in hell.” However, it’s not just Easter that’s felt off lately; most holidays have lost their luster. It’s rare that I get excited for an actual holiday tradition at this point, whether it’s New Years’ Eve fireworks, birthday cards, or the Thanksgiving Day parade, and on further inspection, that lack of joy stems from the hyper-materialization of holidays.

Consider, for a moment, the following celebration. People spend money on gifts of some form or another; they spend money on special themed candy or snacks; they spend money on selecting a message from a generic pile of themed and printed cards; they spend money on overly specialized home decor which is only ever out for a couple weeks of the year; they spend, they spend, and they spend. I hope everyone agrees that this is less an authentic celebration and more an opportunity to push everyone to buy things they don’t need.

Why is it, then, that most holiday celebrations in the 21st century are increasingly resembling that description? Whether it be Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter, July 4th, or even family milestones like birthdays, celebrations have become flat and vapid. We no longer emphasize the opportunity to be with rarely seen family and friends or have a unique celebration that makes each holiday meaningful. Instead, we gather in search of the greatest spending: The finest candies, nicest seasonal decor, and prettiest bits of cardstock filled with board-approved platitudes and one-liners. None of those things were made by us or have any clear value besides the money spent on them, and the holiday spirit gets diluted by every egg-shaped paper plate or inflatable yard Santa.

This rampant materialism in place of actual celebration is bad enough, but there’s a second problem that needs to be addressed: Advertising and brand exploitation. Nearly every major event in the world has wound up with a big old brand slapped across its face, from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ads to the tech companies sponsoring the White House Easter Egg Roll. It’s hard to feel genuine about a celebration or community event when the speakers are namedropping corporations and every celebratory item has paid-for logos plastered on.

Beyond the incessant advertising, companies also needlessly transform their purportedly universal products during the holiday season just so they can sell new and exclusive variants. This can come either through special holiday promotions, like the annual Happy Honda Days in November and December, or through unique product variants. Candy companies are by far the worst offenders in this latter category; just by way of example, PEEPS has over 40 different variants, most of which are themed around particular holidays (Pumpkins and ghosts for Halloween, trees for Christmas, rabbits for Easter, and more). When every holiday is an excuse for Hershey’s to generate a new shape of Reese’s Peanut Butter trees/hearts/eggs/pumpkins, it’s hard to get excited about any one of them.

Unfortunately, the cat is well and truly out of the bag when it comes to corporate involvement and materialism in holidays. The solution, then, is not to somehow ban corporations, but to instead de-monetize and re-personalize holidays. If global-scale traditions are no longer holding value, create new personal traditions. Rather than buying a pile of plastic decor or a pack of holiday cupcakes, consider learning to make a dessert that can become a new family favorite, or involving guests in custom-making decorations. Centering personal joy and connection over sponsored corporate slop will take more effort, but it might just restore a little of the luster that capitalism has drained away.

I will die on this hill: spoilers do not ruin a good story. If a single sentence can “ruin” an entire book, movie or show, then maybe it wasn’t that good to begin with. A truly great story isn’t just about what happens; it’s about how it happens. Knowing the destination doesn’t make the journey any less meaningful.  

People act like hearing one detail completely destroys the experience. But think about it: we rewatch movies all the time. We reread books. We replay games. And somehow they’re still enjoyable, even when we know everything that’s coming. In fact, sometimes they’re more enjoyable. The second time around, you’re not scrambling to keep up with the plot; you’re paying attention to everything else: the dialogue, the pacing, the small choices that build toward the ending you already know.

That’s because the value of a story was never just in the surprise. Surprise is cheap. It’s easy to shock an audience once. What’s hard (and what actually makes something good) is earning that moment. A twist only works if the story has quietly been preparing you for it all along. And spoilers, weirdly, can reveal just how well a story does that. When you know what’s coming, you start noticing the foreshadowing, the subtle hints, the structural precision. You see the craft instead of just reacting to the outcome.

There’s also a difference between knowing what happens and understanding why it happens. A spoiler can give you the bare fact—this person dies, they betray someone, they end up together—but it can’t replicate the emotional experience of getting there. Context matters. Timing matters. Performance, writing, atmosphere all of that is what actually makes a moment hit. And honestly, half the time the so-called “spoiler” is so out of context that it barely means anything anyway. You might know a major event, but you don’t know how it fits into the narrative, what it costs the characters, or how it reshapes everything around it. 

Now, I’m not saying you should go around intentionally spoiling things for people. That’s chaotic, a little inconsiderate, and mostly just annoying. There’s a difference between arguing that spoilers don’t ruin stories and ignoring that people like experiencing things fresh. But if your entire enjoyment of a story depends on not knowing anything beforehand, then maybe what you actually enjoy is the feeling of surprise, not the story itself.

A good story can survive being known. In fact, it should. It should hold up under repetition, under analysis, under familiarity. It should reward you for coming back to it, not punish you for it.

I’m watching Season Two of The Last of Us (there will be no spoilers in this piece!) over the summer with some friends, and we get to a part including an on-screen ritual disembowelment. A child character watches the ritual disembowelment, then stares another character down and makes a slicing motion across his stomach as if drawing one of the curved ritual sickles across it. I remember being completely jolted out of the show as I realized that even if somehow they shielded that child actor from actually seeing the SFX organs spilling out of a strung-up SFX human being, they still had to direct that child to make that motion across his stomach as if cutting into himself, right next to an actor holding a weapon, probably telling him to “look like he was threatening to kill someone” or some similar stage direction. I remember thinking that there’s no way this 8-ish year old child could have understood the impact of this role even if he did personally consent (as opposed to a caretaker making the decision) to act in The Last of Us, and, much like the victims of family vlogging on social media, I wondered whether he would grow up to watch this show back and wonder why in the world his caretakers let that happen to him. 

And even if this child does not sustain long-lasting mental trauma, why is he working? We don’t think about this phenomenon enough. We have child labor laws for a reason; children are easily exploited and should therefore not be working at all, instead focusing on school and brain development. The money is also an issue; generally, parents are in charge of almost the entirety of any payment, and are also in control of signing the child up for events and acting roles. This situation, as I’m sure is obvious, could very easily turn abusive; children cannot stand up for themselves, but are tasked with working a job and making money which the parents then mostly keep. The child does not have a genuine capability to consent to any of this because of their young age and inability to understand the full consequences of what they are agreeing to.

So what am I saying? Should we only have adult actors – no movies with children in them in any capacity? Yes, that is pretty much my point. I think our only ethical options in the acting world are either for adults to act the roles of children or for CGI and motion capturing to be used for any child roles necessary. We could also do animated productions with adult voice actors. 

Wouldn’t this make the productions cheesy and obviously fake? Maybe. I don’t really care. Personal entertainment isn’t everything, and we certainly shouldn’t be sacrificing ethical treatment of children for a limited believability increase in a production we already all know is fictional. I’ll take a slightly uncanny valley CGI Renesmee (don’t search that name up unless you’ve already watched Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1) over a real little boy making a disembowelment gesture over his own stomach in exchange for money that will be kept by his caretakers any day, and really, so should we all.